bochen7
 lvl.2
United States
Offline
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Since someone started freaking out from a different forum, I thought as a legal disclaimer I should put this out:
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""Okay, I am not sure one way or the other on this. However, I work with aircraft firmware as a part of my job, so I like to read people's experiences here and work out what might be going on inside DJI's proprietary system. The previous posts were saying they were told they could not fly until they hit the update button.
Imagine that DJI firmware on the drone has a built-in expiration date which says "DO NOT FLY PAST 2017-02-16 AS REPORTED BY GPS TIME." If you connect to the Internet and there is no new geofencing or logic update patch available on the DJI site, then the built-in expiration date is updated by 1 week or 1 month. If there is an update and it is installed successfully, the new built-in expiration date is also updated accordingly. Such a system would require the user to connect and check for updates on a regular basis, and they would have a clear choice: update or don't fly.
Remember, the operation of aircraft is a heavily regulated industry. There are certain safety requirements for operators and product designers to comply with, even if the end-user likes to think of themselves as special and exempt.""
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Is there a CMOS battery inside the Mavic that I don't know about? How does Mavic keep track of the time when not flying and not powered on? It does a radio sync with atomic clock upon each power up? And what about its location upon power up? I would imagine a Mavic that powers up in China shouldn't be subjected to the same regulations as one that powers up in America via the FAA etc. (in that case, if anything were to be hardcoded like that, should it not default to the least restrictive international law first and then apply more local group policies later?) Edit: If it is using GPS TIME then surely it knows GPS location too.
So far, I've not hit the "DO NOT FLY PAST 2017-02-16 AS REPORTED BY GPS TIME." For the record, I do not recommend that no one ever updates, only that there is reasonable forewarning from DJI whenever an update might affect downtime so that the flying customers can plan for it, in lieu of which, as long as no legislation has made it unlawful to do so, the consumer can exercise his or her rights to use the product in such a way as to not be immediately forced upon any and all updates.
In any case, there is no case law and nothing in my state, and no Federal law that mandates consumers accept manufacture hobby drone updates within a certain amount of time. In fact there is currently nothing that mandates that they have to give updates at all whatsoever.
Jailbreaking an smart phone was deemed in the US to be lawful, then case precedent should apply to those who (I myself would probably not undertake any such endeavors) find a way to turn off the forced GPS/GPSTIME modes of the aircraft and fly in ATTI instead. As long as no laws are broken (not flying it inside the protected radius of airport, or higher than 400 feet etc etc or whatever) then there is currently no law that mandates that consumer drones MUST fly with GPS turned on. If that was the case, the RC model aircraft flying without GPS would get in a lot of trouble, not to mention all the drones out there without GPS functionality whatsoever. (and what about people who still build their own drone from scratch?) But that's not the case.
And while you can register an N number with the FAA for the Mavic, it isn't an airplane and doesn't fall under an aircraft. |
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lvl.4
Second Officer
lvl.1
New
Core User of DJI
